Next week the annual unfunny farce known as the TUC Congress will get underway in Brighton.  Rather than it being a display of strength, what it will actually be is an embrace of weakness, impotence and subservience to the regime now headed by Sir Keir Starmer.

The labour party leader will address the conference and will doubtless repeat his promise, made last week, that things can only get worse. Of course he means things will get worse for the working class, not the ruling class who, as a recent study has found, continue to rake it in.  The labour party has committed itself to a policy of tax rises and wage suppression when it comes to the incomes of workers. The class war is now being waged upon our class not by the cartoon villains in the Tory party but by the party paid for by the union movement itself. 

Many on the British left will go to the TUC congress to lobby it and make demands of its leaders but this is an act of sheer delusion.  What many on the left in Britain fail to understand is that the TUC leaders are not there to actually conduct any kind of class struggle, even of the most minimal variety. Their job is to make sure that no class struggle occurs and if any does break out it is swiftly isolated before it can spread. Millions of workers in Britain are desperate for some kind of leadership, for some kind of way to be shown out of the deep crisis we have been in for well over a decade now.

That leadership will not come from the TUC leaders though. There’s a reason why so many of them end up in the House of Lords, its a reward from the ruling class for policing the working class on their behalf. It is our contention that rather than addressing ourselves to the bureaucrats who are allied with that state and the employers, the left would be better served by promoting a fighting programme amongst the working class.

Rather than contending for influence within an anti-worker organisation such as the TUC, leftists should instead spend their time talking to and learning from the working class. The only way we are going to be able to lead a real fightback in this country is if the working class becomes aware of its potential to actually change things. At the moment workers are misled and tricked into thinking they have no power.

The job of any sincere communist or socialist is to reverse that trend. We can only do that if we focus our efforts on raising the class consciousness of workers, not appealing to our enemies, who run our unions into the ground on behalf of the ruling class.

Republished from classconsciousnessproject.blog with thanks